Visiting Traders!

For this blogpost I visited the international TRADERS conference that took place in AFI, the Italian club house and restaurant in Genk. For three days a select international crowd of researchers, artists and designers gathered around the central question which role Participatory Art and Design can play in the reconfiguration of work (in Genk). (See below for the text in Dutch / zie onderaan de tekst in het Nederlands!)

Let me first tell you something about TRADERS. It’s an abreviation for ‘Training Artists and Design Researchers in participation for public Space’, and that says it all actually. It’s an international project, in cooperation with the European Union, LUCA School of Arts and KU Leuven that focusses on developing and testing a methodological framework on which art and design researchers (LUCA School of Arts researcher Pablo Calderon of The Other Market is one of them) can rely when working on public space projects in participatory ways. The organisational concept for this conference was this of a three-day autumn school, with about ten lectures and visits.

I visited the last days lecture. Frank Moulaert, (Professor and researcher at KU Leuven) did a great talk that started with the intriguing title ‘Urban design and social innovation. The culprit of caring neoliberal urban policy?’ In about an hour he gave an overview of in which ways academic research to urban design on the one side, and social innovation developed in the past. How did the definition develop over the years, and what/who influenced this development? As he said, urban design had undergone many evolutions and transformations up till now.

Social innovation on the other hand is based upon three important and basic criteria: the collective satisfaction of human needs, innovation in social relations and social-political empowerment.

Another question was what the methodological framework for research and assessment does look like, and how did it evolve? For the most used framework, the parameters are on the one side the quality of the relationships between the actors, and on the other side features of spatial qualities. Afterwards he told about the ways design took social innovation on board (and vice versa). During the past decades, design involved signifiers/ met needs to make change tangeable.

In this lecture there was no explicit link with the (social and economic) situation in Genk. From what I saw afterwards there were some visits/case studies with innovating local citizens, so in that way there was a link with the local community.

For the first time this Autumn School was opened to public after registration. But I didn’t recognise a lot of familiar local faces. It looks like in terms of audience and local participation there wasn’t a strong link with the city. Otherwise, I think the overall tone of voice of the event was rather academic, so maybe not very approachable for enormous audiences. Anyway, I think that’s a a bit of a missed opportunity because I did hear, although in a rather academic sense, some very interesting ideas and insights.

I'm Art, born, raised and living in Genk, Belgium. This beautiful multicultural city, built on coal mining and a heavy assemblage and chemical industry currently is switching to a flemish hotspot for sustainable innovation. The goal of this blog is to give you an insider's view about local sustainability initiatives.